Top Producers in the West reveal a strong dependence on cash-out refis

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Cash-out refinances are important to greater share of originators in the West than in the United States as a whole, according to the Top Producers 2019 survey.

Approximately 85% of the region's loan officers attached some degree of importance to cash-out refis this year, with 60% calling it extremely important. In comparison, 73% of survey participants nationwide said that cash-out refis were an important part of their business plans, and 46% called these loans extremely important.

In line with those numbers, strategies Top Producers in the West attribute their success to include some marketing efforts specifically focused on generating these types of loans.

For example: Quoc Do, a senior mortgage loan officer who worked at TIAA Bank in Pleasanton, Calif., last year and currently works for PNC Bank, uses a customer relationship management platform to keep information about available home equity levels in front of prospective borrowers.

"I am using Homebot which is a CRM that sends my clients' information about their home value and information about refinancing or buying up in home value monthly," he said.

Other strategies top producers in West found helpful given a relatively scarcity of traditional rate-and-term refis in the past year included the cultivation of referral partners in the purchase market.

"The refinance market has dried up and we all knew that was coming," said Oleg Tkach, a branch manager at the Lynnwood, Wash., office of Guild Mortgage. "Focusing on building relationships with Realtors while most lenders chased refinances has helped position my team to succeed in a down market."

Given the number of hot housing markets across the Western region, it is not surprising that this is one of two regions where originators also consider being able to market jumbo loans more important than top producers nationwide do. (The other region is the Northeast, where home prices also can be high.)

Nationwide, 61% of top producers consider having jumbo products extremely important to meeting their origination goals, compared with 66% of originators in the West.
The self-employed are an important subset of jumbo borrowers some top producers in the West said contributed to their high volumes in the past year.

Many of the self-employed erroneously feel that they won't qualify for a mortgage, but they become interested when they learn there are options available, said Damon Germanides, the broker of record at Beverly Hills, Calif.-based Insignia Mortgage, whose average loan size in 2018 was over $1.7 million.

"Many of the smaller banks we work with are happy to work with self-employed borrowers and work through their more complex tax structure," he said.

Here are the top 20 mortgage originators based in the West: